Kurosawa, best acclaimed for his 1950 film Rashomon, once called a censor’s detection of obscenity in the following line a “case of sexual pathology": “The factory gate waited for the student workers, thrown open in longing." From the script of his 1944 The Most Beautiful, it laid bare both the challenge of scissor snips and the dicey world of plausible truths he earned his plaudits for. As liberty of thought and speech go hand-in-hand, curbs on either could cause heavy intellectual losses. Our Constitution has it down as a basic right. Yet, it allows a few restrictions for reasons that range from India’s sovereignty, integrity, state security and foreign relations to public order and decency. This isn’t all that has long justified film censorship. Movies are special. They can move people. Roused passions, some argue, are best kept in check for the sake of children and other vulnerable folks. As cinema can shape attitudes, political stakes also tend to favour censorship. Willy-nilly, it exists. Wisdom in its exercise, though, is quite another matter, a debate stirred by the theatrical reception to Vivek Agnihotri’s The Kashmir Files on the tragic exodus of Pandits in 1990.
The Valley’s Hindu minority departed under the grim shadow of terror and its echoes of Partition have been in need of cathartic airing, empathy and sensitivity. ‘Never again’ needs to be everyone’s resolve. Nervy as the subject is, it must stay open to enquiry, even if fraught with politics. Shades of ideology often attend a storyteller’s craft. Advocacy of democracy, for example, is clear in Servant of the Nation, a fictional 2015 series about a common man elevated by a viral rant to Ukraine’s presidency. It starred Volodymyr Zelensky, elected to that post in 2019, and featured quips like a gadget described as “fair communism" for “satisfying our needs in spite of our capabilities". Ideology is inevitable in art. If a film is based on real events, as The Kashmir Files is, then it must pass a stricter test of creative liberty. While its ideological frame is obvious in its hardsell of Article 370’s abrogation, a saffron cause, its sensibility would have gained much from a Kurosawa-like lens on an issue with multiple perspectives. Its portrayals of terrorists, however, blur all too easily with those of Muslim locals. Script snips could not have tackled such a lack of nuance, though other cuts could’ve served ends that our free-speech caveats were arguably meant for.
What a film could graciously leave out (or ‘un-vivify’) but doesn’t is often taken as a statement, especially if it happens to have overt attributions to some kind of religious agency. Six decades after the Holocaust, The Passion of the Christ, Mel Gibson’s 2004 crucifixion film, was slammed by critics for a brief rabbi scene. It still seems shunned; a Netflix search cues Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List instead, a classic that Agnihotri has sought to compare his film with. Actual footage of Nazi camps, though, testify to the extent Spielberg went to play down his rendition of profound horrors—and dignify Jewish suffering. While such subtlety could be argued to better suit a historical tragedy that already has global sympathy, gory depictions of the kind in the current film—with repeat flashes—call for reflection on film-making and its aims. Movie-makers may rediscover restraint, even as censors—or self-censors—re-acquaint themselves with what justified the role of scissors in the first place. Tales that need to be told must never be muzzled. But the aesthetic we employ in appealing to an audience matters.
